There is a long tradition in advertising of founders putting themselves on camera to vouch for their products, a practice that dates at least to Frank Perdue and his chickens and continues through the various mattress entrepreneurs who appear to sleep very well indeed.
For decades, the pharmaceutical industry has operated under an understanding so elegant it was almost too good to be true: Tell television viewers about the most serious risks of your arthritis medication, and then cheerfully direct them to a website or toll-free number for the rest.
The advertising industry has spent decades searching for the Holy Grail of marketing measurement — a reliable way to prove that the money spent on commercials actually produces sales.
The trajectory from college basketball player to sports broadcasting institution is not, as it happens, a straight line — though in the case of James Brown, the longtime CBS studio host, it does seem to have been drawn with a certain inevitability.
There is a saying on Madison Avenue that has survived decades of consolidation, digital transformation, and the rise and fall of several holding company empires: nothing kills a bad product faster than good advertising.
For most of the last two decades, the relationship between publishers and Google Search resembled nothing so much as a very long marriage in which one partner controlled the checking account.
The logic of branded content has always been circular: a brand finds something beautiful, attaches itself to it, and then asks you to admire both at once.